Published
Up to $48.8 million in funding expands agency’s portfolio to support data-driven research and innovative clinical trial platforms to uncover the drivers of disease and test therapies before symptoms take hold
This week, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, announced three new projects aimed at breaking down barriers that have long prevented progress in treating Alzheimer’s disease. With a collective investment of up to $48.8 million, these projects leverage safe and secure data sharing to model the causes and trajectories of Alzheimer’s disease, as well as innovative platform clinical trials to find therapies that slow or stop the progression of this devastating condition in its earliest stages.
"Alzheimer's is among the most devastating diseases Americans face as they age, and for too long, the conventional pace of biomedical research has not delivered the breakthroughs families desperately need," said Al Bugazia, M.D., ARPA-H Proactive Health Office Deputy Director. "ARPA-H has a unique ability to break down barriers and reimagine our approach to Alzheimer's research. These new projects will help us better understand how and why Alzheimer's develops and begin to build realistic tools to stop it in its tracks."
Through active program management, ARPA-H will work closely with performers from:
- Mass General Brigham, which is developing new therapies for the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s—before cognitive decline takes hold—by launching a national, first-of-its-kind biomarker-guided clinical trial platform to rapidly test multiple preventative therapies at once.
- Washington University in St. Louis, which will rapidly accelerate Alzheimer’s research by building an open-data, AI-enabled platform with cutting-edge multi-omic data to uncover the drivers of the disease and speed the search for effective treatments.
- Bevimi, Inc., which will tackle Alzheimer’s earlier by mapping the biology of pre-symptomatic cognitive decline and testing an intervention through a fully decentralized clinical trial designed to generate a rich, reusable longitudinal dataset.
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), which is embedding Alzheimer’s-relevant biomarker, imaging, and brain-activity measures into a randomized clinical trial in at-risk older adults to reveal how novel interventions may affect brain health before symptoms emerge. The award is $2.75 million in additional funding to UCSF for their existing work with ARPA-H through the EVIDENT initiative.
The new awards join existing, complementary efforts across ARPA-H that address Alzheimer’s disease, totaling up to $155.3 million. The agency’s NIGHT study aims to better monitor and improve women’s sleep quality to mitigate their heightened risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. And the recently awarded BIOGAMI program will detect and repair the earliest stages of protein dysfunction underlying Alzheimer’s disease.